`I Remember' Mastroianni / Documentary begins film series

Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Critic

Published
4:00 am PST, Tuesday, January 11, 2000

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For 22 years, Anna Marie Tato was Marcello Mastroianni's companion and best friend. A filmmaker and journalist, Tato had the foresight to capture the famous actor on film before he died in December 1996 at 72.

"Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, Yes I Remember," which plays January 21 and 23 at the Castro, is a three-hour, 20-minute documentary in which the great Italian star speaks about his life and career, his uneasy relationship with celebrity and his dislike for the "Latin lover" label ("a true stupidity") that began with his appearance in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" (1960).

One reason for the documentary's length is that Tato, at Mastroianni's request, includes full scenes from Mastroianni's films rather than abbreviated clips.

Filmed just three months before Mastroianni's death when he was shooting his last film, Manoel de Oliveira's "A Voyage to the Beginning of the World," in Portugal, the documentary will be followed by a 21-film retrospective, "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of: The Films of Marcello Mastroianni."

For anyone who admired Mastroianni, "I Remember" confirms the sense of an extraordinary man. Modest and ironic, enormously charming, Mastroianni describes his roots as a carpenter's son, his childhood infatuation with movies, his 10 years as a stage actor and his distrust of vanity ("I've always tried to annul my looks").

"He was a very great storyteller," Tato said during a visit to San Francisco. "He was very funny. The thing that I loved most in him was the irony, the self-irony.

"It was a great relationship," she says of her years with Mastroianni. "It was our longest, of course. Marcello never had so long a relationship. Twenty-two years is a lifetime."

CALLING THE SHOTS

Before "I Remember," Tato had filmed dozens of portraits of artistic figures as well as the fiction film "The Night and the Moment" (1994) with Willem Dafoe and Lena Olin. Having spent so much time behind the camera, asking questions and calling the shots, she's a tough interview.

When asked how she met Mastroianni, for example, she replies with a question: "Is that interesting?" Asked her age, she answers "84" and laughs. Last year she told the New York Times that she was 15 years Mastroianni's junior: That would make her 60.

The couple shared a flat in Paris, but Mastroianni never divorced his wife of 48 years, Flora Carabella. Tato won't discuss Carabella. Also off-limits: Mastroianni's frequent co- star Sophia Loren, his onetime lover Catherine Deneuve or the daughter, Chiara, that Deneuve bore him.

The relationship was apparently formed, at least in part, by the couple's differences. "I come from the south (of Italy)," Tato says. "I'm like this" -- she balls her fists together -- "too much passion." Mastroianni, on the other hand, was intellectual, reserved, "cultivated."

At one point in "I Remember," wearing a fedora and sitting under a huge shade tree, Mastroianni speaks of man's foolish destruction of his physical environment. The words flow so naturally from him, and are spoken with such feeling, that one never suspects it's actually a monologue from Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya."

For that reason, Tato says, "This is not just a documentary. If you want, it's a docudrama because Marcello is always acting in it . . . everything is mixed. Always it's a surprise."

Tato filmed Mastroianni during breaks from the de Oliveira film: in a car, on a boat, in a hotel room. She recruited Fellini's cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and used just one camera and a tiny, six-person crew in order not to disrupt de Oliveira.

ONE TAKE

"We shot for two weeks," Tato says. "We had problems with rainstorms. But I was lucky because Marcello was so good. We did just one take for everything. I think it's a miracle." It's remarkable, given that Mastroianni was dying of pancreatic cancer, that he was able to work on the de Oliveira film, then turn around and spin anecdotes for Tato's documentary.

That's not all: When he was finished with those projects, he toured Italy in a stage play, "The Last Moons," giving his last performance Nov. 6, 1996. He died six weeks later.

Asked if he was in pain during the shooting of "I Remember," Tato demurs. "I don't like to speak about this sickness. It's private. I don't want to speak about my pain," she says. "Why must I cry (in public)? Why must I play the role of widow?"

In addition to being Mastroianni's screen biographer, Tato supervises the protection of his image. Anyone wanting to duplicate his face on T-shirts or coffee mugs has to seek her approval, she says, "but I will not say yes."

"I don't care about money. Mar cello never did. Sometimes he made a choice to do a movie paying one third of another movie. He'd say, 'Well, it's more amusing.' Never 'This will be successful.' "

Of course he was happy if a movie succeeded, she says. "But really he thought, 'A movie is a movie. We are not saving the world.' "

FILM RETROSPECTIVE

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI: I REMEMBER, YES I REMEMBER: The movie screens January 21 and 23 at the Castro Theater. A retrospective of Mastroianni's films runs Friday through February 12 at the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way in Berkeley, and repeats January 21 through February 3 at the Castro, 429 Castro St. in San Francisco. Call (510) 642-1124 for information on the Berkeley screenings, and (415) 931-3456 for information on the Castro screenings.